


Forget the horror here

by consultingwives (westminsterabi)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: ANGSTY ANGST ANGST, Angst, Fem!Sherlock, Fem!mycroft, Femlock, Gen, holy shit is this depressing, literally everything cw, suicide cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:08:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5437826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westminsterabi/pseuds/consultingwives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock attempts suicide, not for the first time, despite her status as a promising chemistry student at Cambridge. She struggles to understand where her life went wrong, what brought her to drugs and depression, and what she must do to live her life once again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget the horror here

**Author's Note:**

> Holy fuck is this fic going to be depressing. Just take care of yourself. 
> 
> Basically, this is based on my own struggles with depression, although I've never attempted suicide. Please comment if you think any portrayals are inaccurate/problematic.
> 
> Title is from Spanish Sahara by Foals.

Funny thing, drugs. They make you want to do things that you otherwise probably wouldn’t find appealing. Remembering how I got sucked into them—how I began this downward spiral, towards destruction of my mental faculties, towards hatred of myself and my metier and, without exaggeration intended, the entire world, truly—is beyond difficult, perhaps because the brain finds painful experiences abhorrent and would rather erase them, or perhaps because there was no reason in the first place.

 

Do I hate myself? The answer to that is an emphatic yes—and no one would ever think otherwise. Ask Mycroft, she’d probably scoff and remind the questioner of the multiple times I’ve woken up in hospital and been told that I’m “lucky to be alive”.

 

Clearly, those doctors have a fucked up idea of lucky, because _lucky_ in my head is the exact antithesis of waking up. _Lucky_ is blackness. _Lucky_ is enough heroin to go chasing oblivion, enough methadone to make the world swim away. _Lucky_ is a length of rope or scarlet tendrils falling down my pale white arms. _Lucky_ is knowing that there’s no one around to call 999, and knowing that this porcelain white bathtub, covered in scarlet film, filled with light pink water, is likely the last thing you’ll ever see; that the last thing you’ll ever feel is the cold tile against your thighs, the porcelain against your breasts.

 

This time, _lucky_ was a bottle of aspirin, a kitchen knife, and the flatmates out for the evening.

 

What it definitely wasn’t: the light swimming behind my eyelids, the realisation that I was hooked up to a heart monitor and the dull ache of naloxone coursing through my veins. The knowledge that despite my best efforts, once again I’d managed to fail at dying. Naturally, I was hooked up to an anti-opioid. Naloxone. Probably at Mycroft’s request. Her little sister can’t be allowed to stay high, not for any length of time, and soon she’ll be shipped off to rehab at mummy and daddy’s request, because my life, after all, is not my own.

 

I’ll die before I go back there.

 

Hospitals are always disturbing. They stink of drugs and cleaning fluid and stress. I was supposed to be three stories down, in the mortuary, incapable of registering any of this, but instead I’m here. Mycroft managed to get me a room with a window, I see, not that I’m enjoying it at all. She should have saved it for someone who cares about looking out over London—who values their own life and their ability to see the city below them, and who is grateful for their life having been miraculously restored. I am none of these things.

 

There will be the old standby, fluoxetine, waiting for me, of course. Or maybe something stronger, after all, since the deep, now stitched-up cuts running parallel down my wrists are a great indication that SSRIs don’t quite do it for me. Tricyclics maybe, MAOIs, NDRIs, or some other new, fun drug cocktail to knock the sad out of Sherlock Holmes’ brain and _turn that frown upside down!_

I want nothing more right now that to be under the cold dirt, alone with my thoughts. I hate myself. I hate everything about myself. I cannot think of a single body part that I do not find repugnant, or a single thought in my brain that I do not wish I could erase with bleach. I am not, and never have been, good enough for what I do.

 

There is Mycroft, of course, always throwing her intelligence in my face. She has done her best throughout my life to press me down to the size of a pea and to make sure that I know I am a complete idiot, unfit for existence.

 

_I am a complete and utter idiot, unfit for existence._

 

_Ich bin ein Blödel, und ich bin als Leben völlig ungeeignet._

Something about German makes the stark truths of life— _stark_ : strong—easier to swallow. Perhaps it’s because I’m still somewhat distant from the language. French is by far my strongest foreign language, and I speak it almost as well as I do English. My German is a little rustier, and the slight barrier that my incompetence affords me gives me a little breathing room, when it comes to difficult realities.

 

She was always the cleverest of our siblings, the most promising and precocious and ambitious. The best at navigating real life. Me, I was always awkward, bumbling, incapable of coping socially. The lack of friends hasn’t done my self-esteem any favours, but then again, neither would _having_ friends, since they’d very likely be cleverer than me, and make me feel, once again, worthless.

 

Nothing I do has even proven to Mycroft, to my parents, to my professors, that I am anything other than mediocre at best or a complete failure at worst. A first proves nothing good, anything less than a first proves that I do not deserve my place at Cambridge. Obviously. The world spent my first twelve years convincing me that I was praiseworthy, that I was a special kind of genius who would change the world, and the following seven convincing me that I was in no way worthy of life—that I was pathetic, ugly, too skinny, too tall, too butch, not clever enough, too odd, and completely emotionally incompetent.

 

How do you reconcile the two? Clearly, as my own solution has elegantly proved, you don’t. You off yourself. Problem solved.

 

Now I’m on suicide watch, and I suppose that I will have to deal with these dueling contradictions for at least a little while longer, until I can get my hands on a bottle of sleeping pills and a litre of vodka to get the job well and truly done. No more fuss, no more beating round the bush or going in halfway. One would expect this ordeal to have cooled my attitude towards death somewhat, but no. I’ll take the void, thank you very much.

 

Maybe I ought to move—change of scenery ought to do me good. But no, as soon as I get out of this place I’m going home to rest. Permanently.

 

“NHS won’t send you to rehab without your consent,” says Mycroft, who is sitting in the corner of the room. I was so out of it that I hardly noticed her there. I’m even the opposite of doped up—I should be sharper than usual, although perhaps the withdrawal is what’s causing this fog.

 

Mycroft is wearing a crisp black suit, pearl-grey pantyhose, and a tasteful string of pearls. She looks like the shark that she is, which is a surprise. There’s a kind of dullness in her eyes right now that she almost never allows to worm its way out. Perhaps now that she’s made QC, at the tender age of 26, she feels no more need to hide her true ruthless, cutthroat nature. I haven’t seen her in a few months.

 

“Axe to grind, Mycroft?” She runs her fingers (elegantly manicured, of course, because she can afford that kind of thing) over the mahogany handle of a black umbrella. That’s new. Her auburn hair is swept back into a chignon, without a tendril escaping. It’s chilling. She inherited our parents’ straight hair, whereas my curls came from somewhere else entirely. Perhaps lurking somewhere in both their DNA, biding their time.

 

Perhaps lurking, more easily in sight, in the postman’s gene pool. The world may never know.

 

“You know very well that a fifth suicide attempt disqualifies you from any further assistance. You’re a lost cause, Sherlock. The government would have it that you go home and quietly off yourself with a bottle of pills, as you’ve been—don’t argue—as you yourself have been contemplating. Luckily for you, and for the Met—don’t think I haven’t kept an eye on you—I was able to pull some strings. The admitting hospital is still under some contention, but there’s no doubt that you’ll receive help.”

 

I start pulling the electrodes off of my chest, and the steady beating of the heart monitor gives way to one shrill beep.

 

“Sherlock, refusing to speak to me is simply childish.”

 

If this is childish, I’ll be a child, as I swing my legs out of the hospital bed and waltz out of the Royal London with my buttocks showing through the crack in the hospital gown. I hope Mycroft enjoys the footage, knowing that she has no legal right to restrain me. The air in the city is thick and soupy with humidity. It’s late July, and it’s drizzling. I flag the first cab I see.

 

“Montague Street,” I tell the driver.


End file.
